


Intentions & Apologies

by plasticpumpkins



Category: Chronicle (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Apathy, Bisexuality, Blood, Breaking the Fourth Wall, Canon-Typical Violence, Death, Death Wishes, Depression, F/M, Hope for the future, Introspection, Jealousy, Kissing, Love, M/M, Multi, POV First Person, Suicidal Thoughts, Violence, Vomit, anger issues, self-harm mention, unethical inclusion of reader, year skipping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-08
Updated: 2016-12-08
Packaged: 2018-09-07 07:07:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8788381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plasticpumpkins/pseuds/plasticpumpkins
Summary: A letter from Matt Garetty to the outside world. Or - a recollection of Matt Garetty's depression, or his stolen rum, throughout the years and his experience with Chronicle as a whole. Written for a friend who wanted Matt to be a little bit more hopeful for the future, and more TED-talkish than he should be. (Shout out to you, Jay.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is the longest non-chaptered Chronicle fic I've written and I'm just a little bit proud of it. If it's not all that great, you can punch me. Please don't punch me.

When I was twelve, I was caught in a haze of black and white photography with sharp words scribed at the bottom. Those photos depicted sadness, I suppose. Back then, I liked them. I liked the melancholic feeling that I got from them. There was something so nostalgic about those rainy parking lots, those empty fields, and those darkened rooms. I connected with the lack of people in the photos. I thought barren land meant something because sadness was really vacancy. I thought it was the concept of people existing, but not around you or not in the right way. When I was twelve, sadness was beautiful because it did not belong to me. It was a foreign concept that I could romanticize. It was pretty. Empty.

It only found me on the days that were supposed to be sunny, when it rained and kept me indoors. I was not friends with sadness, but we were acquaintances. We met when I scraped my knees. Or when my friends canceled our plans. It did not last long, and could be manipulated by my mother’s gentle, soothing voice. It was never black and white for me. It was more like a colored photo with black blotches edging into the shot. It was not all that concerning because I breathed in and out properly. 

And then, at thirteen, it changed. Sadness was not bloody knees or lonely weekends, it was throwing up dinner because my stomach rejected any implication of wholeness. It was staring at a bookbag full of homework, and going to bed instead. It did not feel like a black and white photograph, but I did. I felt empty, like a church without the rows and rows of pews. I was the space between the aisles almost. I was a religion without a God. I was something that used to be whole. I knew that because there was a hole in my stomach that used to hold hope, but was replaced with a small, grumbling monster. 

I felt guilty for feeling the way I did. My mother had a certain way of claiming my depression as her own. I told her I wanted to kill myself, and she doubled over, placing her head in her hands. I was fourteen then, in that single moment. My name had sounded like the saddest thing to ever grace her tongue as her straight, brown hair fell in front of her face like a curtain. One that shielded her worried frown and the constant stream of tears from me. She looked like she’d be in a photograph. A sad one. 

‘’Matt,’’ she began, her satin voice was painfully soft and pleading as it met my ears. ‘’I can’t lose another child. You have to get better. Please. Please, get better.’’ 

I couldn’t ask her that night why a lonely, breathing child was better than a lonely, dead child. My thoughts were harrowing, but the empathy in my chest begged me to quiet down. To lie just to calm her down. I knew that she did not grow up the same way I did. I knew, back then, sadness was found in the bottom of coca cola bottles and in the orange dirt on a rocky driveway. She did not know that I had knots in my stomach or that my childhood felt isolatedly dreary every time I thought of it. I lied to her, but if anything, I was good at that. What a talented liar I was, deceiving everyone, including myself. 

She left my room that night with reddened eyes and quivering hands. In the pit of my stomach, guilt and frustration bloomed like stormclouds in the springtime and I destroyed a glass case of guitar picks. It shattered below me in a burst of transparency and violence. I could not admit to myself that it had felt better than anything before. Better than those magazines under my bed at the time. Better than strawberry-lime pie. Being able to destroy something made me feel powerful in a situation in which I had no control. It was a false sense of security, one that tucked me into bed at night and left me calm. 

I hid the chemical imbalance inside of my head like stolen rum. It was tucked safely away in the front pocket of my hoodie, and I manipulated it in the same way it manipulated me. In the struggle to seem regular, I kept my hands in my pockets, making sure it never slipped out onto the floor where everyone could see. Sick teenagers are medicated. Regular teenagers go to school. I did neither. I was neither.

I smoked at fifteen just to spite my lungs. I hid behind sheds with chipping paint and felt the blood pulse through my veins. I could hear the neighbor’s playing Christmas music distantly, but it would not muffle the frantic beat of my heart. It did not feel like Christmas. It felt like October. I still had a bucket of halloween candy on my dresser. It made me feel like time refused to pass for people like me. I was fine with sitting in June while November passed. Just as long as it was quiet enough to breathe. 

And then, without warning, I was sixteen and sitting on the boat of a stranger who called himself my best friend. We were anchored in the middle of the lake as the moonlight poured upon the wavering surface of the water like honey, slow and gentle. I knew that there was more to life than this emptiness, this vacant sea of loneliness but I couldn’t find it anywhere. The stranger, or my best friend at the time, was tampering with his cellphone. I instinctively checked if mine was still in my pocket. It was. Of course. David was wealthy enough to afford this boat, and I suppose I had been wealthy enough to sit on it. It didn’t matter much to me, however. Money was nothing. Nothing mattered to me then. 

‘’There’s no signal out here,’’ he said, blowing smoke out in the same breath. He was pressing buttons on a glowing screen with his right hand with a cigarette in his left. The light of his phone was blinding. Only, anything would seem bright out there in the dark. The moon was a dull lamp that did nothing to protect us from the forest that bordered the body of water. ‘’Why did we come here anyway?’’ 

‘’I like to be outside at night, but my front porch was getting boring,’’ I replied, my long legs dangling over the side of the boat to submerge my feet in the inky water. I was not afraid of what swam beneath it. The feeling of anxiety had ceased a long ago. If anything, I wished for something to happen. Anything to bring attention to myself. I needed a reason to cry for help. One that didn’t dwell in chemicals or trauma or vacancy. A bloody foot would warrant a visit to the emergency room. 

David scoffed, ‘’Do you have any normal likes?’’ 

I thought it over. ‘’I like conspiracy theories, I guess.’’ 

‘’Why?’’ he asked, always full of questions. He padded over, taking a shaky seat beside me. His feet didn’t quite meet the water. He awkwardly shoved his cellphone back into his pocket, deeming it useless now. It was so quiet between our words. I found myself without a good answer while also despising the murky silence. I focused hard on the water below, pulling my feet up until I could almost see the white tops of them just beneath the sheen of dark liquid. I pushed them back down. 

I had to think hard about his question, uncomfortable with coming off as strange while also hoping it was enough to drive David away. ‘’I’d like to think that things aren’t so boring, y’know, like our lives now are full of mediocrity and it’s so exhausting. So, I take to believing in, well, unrealistic things. Only, I don’t think they’re unrealistic. I think they’re just as possible as driving to work safely,’’ I told him, ignoring the way my own voice sounded. My interests seemed absurd aloud, but they were all I had to keep me in place. To keep my breathing even and steady amongst the darkness. I felt wronged.

David made a small humming noise, and I looked over to find him staring at me. The moonlight glimmered on his dark skin, somehow illuminating his hazel eyes. They seemed to flash in the dimness around us. ‘’You’re interesting, Matt,’’ he told me, and I found my eyes drifting down to his lips, those that seemed to always be wrapped around a cigarette. Despite being alone together in the middle of a privately owned lake, I felt like we were being watched. Like _I_ was being watched. Tested. Surveyed. 

It reminded me of those black and white photographs. Only, this time, we sat within one. We were ruining the shot. ‘’I wouldn’t seem interesting if you had met someone like me before,’’ I said quietly, dismissing his compliment uncomfortably. I didn’t want to be anything to anyone. I was trying to trace my roots back to the ground, but it was impossible to do so when people knew my route home. David knew my address. My last name. The type of orange juice I drank. My phone number. 

‘’If I had, they wouldn’t have been exactly like you, so you’re wrong. There isn’t anyone else like you,’’ he countered, his breath was warm on my face and I felt like I had moths inside of my ribcage. 

‘’What do you know about people?’’ I asked, hoping to disperse the tension. 

‘’Enough,’’ he answered, and then he was moving forward, pressing his bowed lips into mine. My eyes fluttered closed, my system shut down. David did not cure the frustration in my stomach, but he stirred it around. It was a different kind of distress now. Another problem hidden away in my pockets. I melted into him, like it was all I ever knew how to do, and ignored the taste of smoke in his mouth. I just wanted to forget myself. I wanted to become invisible, but his hands were reaching towards me.

David was a rich boy who lived in a big, empty house. I suppose, at the time, a middle-class teenager with nothing but ten dollars in his pocket was the answer for him. We did not fix each other. He was still lonely. And so was I. We kissed like middle schoolers at summer camp. It was almost exciting, but mostly uneventful. We did not arouse the love within each other. We were strangers, or maybe best friends, who made impulsive choices. He did not really want to kiss me, but anything to disperse my sadness. Anything to make my sullen face a little less lugubrious. He was sick of me. And so was I. 

There was nothing quite like being forced to live. David wanted to kiss the life into me. My mother wanted to guilt-trip the life into me. I did not understand why it mattered. I wanted desperately to care about that boy’s hands sliding into my pants. I wanted desperately to care about my mother’s tears. But they, like everything, meant nothing to me. I could not make myself pay attention. The monster in my brain did not care for kissing or for empathy. It wanted silence. Complete and utter silence. 

But I was full of noises. I was loud music. I was glass shattering. I was gunshots and fireworks. I was the subtle difference between the two. I was the echo of ambulance sirens in the middle of the night. I irked the monster with all the racket, and it could not escape, so it clawed up the walls of my mind, making sound of its own. It would cry for help with its violent pleas, trying to talk me out of life. My mother was not its mother. It did not see her. It saw someone who refused to turn down the radio. My friend was not its friend. It did not see him. It saw someone who slept with the television on. 

That night, I pulled away from David. He looked at me with his dilated eyes as confusion washed over his moonlit face. ‘’I want to go home,’’ I said, and I watched him nod, but after that, my movements became mechanical. I went into autopilot mode and I let go. I let the monster rip holes into the blanket of walls that protected us both because nothing mattered. As a robot, I found myself climbing off David’s boat and stumbling to my car. My hands shook as I struggled to unlock the doors. I did not call that stranger, or my best friend, again. I did not want to be touched. I did not want to be loved. 

I passed him in the hallways at school for the rest of the year as a robot. Not as the human that kissed him in the middle of a lake on his father’s boat. There was not a beautiful way to explain that love did not pool in my stomach. It did not surface. It was buried beneath layers and layers of orange dirt. 

Robots are cold. Robots are unfeeling. 

I did not want to be home. I did not want to be at school. I wanted to be nowhere. So, I stayed in places I did not belong. I hoped that, by being caught, I’d be relieved to be in a place I belonged. But in my crowded house, with my busy family, I did not fit into place. And in those empty places, where I trespassed and smoked illegally, the police never came. But the darkness loved to swallow me whole, thinking I’d be afraid of what blended into its shadows. I was not fearful. I had my own monster. 

However, the nights I ended up back home, forced beneath heavy ceilings, I’d seek my mother out. She’d have that tired look in her blue eyes and I’d be reminded that her days are longer than mine will ever be. ‘’I don’t feel well,’’ I would say to her, the same words that were uttered every day. The monster would remind me that I sounded like a broken record. I repeated the same words over and over and over again. ‘’I don’t know what to do with myself.’’ 

She would then look up, her mouth contorted into an awful frown. ‘’What was it today?’’ 

‘’I remembered I was useless again.’’ 

‘’You’re not useless, Matt,’’ she said mechanically, like every other time, but I knew her far too well. She knew the truth. She saw the lack of movement. The lack of dialogue. I was empty space. Static. 

I sighed shakily, rolling my shoulders back. ‘’Goodnight, mom.’’ 

‘’Goodnight. I love you,’’ she would say, and then I left her room, thrumming with nothing in particular, walking and walking and walking until the hallway seemed more familiar. 

And then there was Andrew Detmer, who had lingered in the background of my life for years. We had been close as children, then grew unruly as the years went up. Somehow, we managed to slip back together. I drove him to school in the mornings, and tried to force the energy out of myself with agitating pop music that drove us both up the wall. He was quiet most of the time. He did not want to be in the places that I dwelled, simply because he was running from the sound. Much like my monster. 

I found that I liked parties. Not because of the people. Or the music. Or the lights. But because at a party, I was no one. I was merely another body in a sea of people that could not remember anyone else’s name. I could stand in the middle of a crowd, and forget that my pockets were filled with the stolen rum, or maybe my depression. However you’d like to see it. I found that I’d rather be criminalistic than sick. I’d rather feel guilty than empty. Guilt held substance. Empty held me in place.

And Andrew, well… 

Andrew seemed unreal, whether he was in the passenger seat of my car or desperately trying to find the exit of a rave he was not invited to, carrying a clunky camera on his shoulder. He looked out of place. I did not know how to explain the concept of being strategically placed in a room full of other people. You’d find that, even if you are opaque amongst solids, blending is not as hard as it seems. He didn’t want to be anywhere. We coped differently. We thought differently. A part of me thought, in my conviction of him coming to this party, that he would understand. But he couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. 

He thought I was exposing his transparent glare to a room of solid colors. He was right. 

I left him alone that night because I was impulsive and forgetful. My mother said I was both of those things, indirectly blaming my father’s genetics. Despite her always leaving her keys and yelling when the situation didn’t call for it. No matter the cause, I left him somewhere in a wave of people that thrashed because the music encouraged it. I didn’t have to hear him say it to know that he had felt betrayed. But I was already being pulled out of the door and dragged through the woods in a haste. 

And then I was in the middle of an empty field with giggling teenagers swaying around me, holding red and blue cups filled with unfamiliar alcohol. I realized then that underaged kids would drink anything that would get them drunk. I related heavily to the feeling of wanted to make reality seem a little less harsh, and when you were stoned out of your mind, it was a lot easier to ignore the stolen rum. I let the smoke fill my lungs, the world slowly but surely toning down until it was merely a pixelated mass of nothing but bubbly laughter and shared drinks in the dark. I found myself in the dark far too often. 

Diluted happiness clouded my mind, pulling the life out of me as if it had always been then. I knew, unfortunately, that it was not going to be constant. I was reminded that these craved highs ended just as quickly as they started. Hope looped around my wrists, holding me in place, soothing my itchy skin and incessant brain. Anything and everything felt possible. Even approaching the most popular boy in school and grinning at him like I was something other than a compulsive liar. It went well. Smoothly. 

The moonlight reflected off of Steve Montgomery’s leather jacket, which held my attention for far too long. I found myself positioned within the circle of people that had gathered around him. He was smiling, blue cup in hand, and glancing between those who were holding conversations. At that moment, he was available. ‘’Hey,’’ I said, gaining his attention. I found that when his brown eyes were centered on me, something within me shifted curiously. ‘’Calm weather we’re having, huh?’’

Steve cocked his head playfully at me, as if we weren’t strangers. I could tell he was tipsy, but it made me feel safer. Like maybe he’d forget to remember me stumbling over my own words. ‘’Calm weather, Garetty? That’s the best you got?’’ he said in return, his warm voice steady below the sound of laughter He seemed to solve my monster’s problem by being at the perfect volume. 

I could feel myself flushing bright red in embarrassment, ‘’I’m not the best at conversation starters, okay? Give me a break.’’ 

He chuckled, shaking his head. ‘’Okay, okay. I’ll go along with your lame small talk. We’re having excellent weather tonight. You’re right. It’s better than the awful rainstorm we had last week.’’ 

‘’I slipped and hit my head on the cement at school because of that fuckin’ storm,’’ I slurred, suddenly recalling the event and scowling in annoyance. I still had a bump on my head because of it. And even worse, Andrew had seen it happen in broad daylight. Nothing could stop his incessant laughter that day, even me threatening to rip his hands off. He just laughed harder as I looked up at him from my unflattering position on the slick ground. I began to feel better about leaving him behind. 

Steve’s eyebrows came together in something that looked like both concern and amusement. ‘’There’s the Matt we all know and love,’’ he said, reaching out pat my shoulder comfortingly. He had a certain way of making me feel better while also making me feel pathetic. Either way, I believed it was unintentional. I envied his ability to be simultaneously complex and simple. It was admirable in a way.

Before I could respond, a hoard of voices emanated from across the field. There was a few people shrouded around something in the ground but their bodies obstructed my view. Steve and I exchanged confused glances before stumbling over to the scene, curiosity peaked in a mixture of childlike interest and vodka. What we found was a large, gaping hole. One that drew violent vibrations from the ground and shook the people who stood around it. Steve Montgomery did not seem to be anything other than normal, but as he grinned downwards, I began to doubt that. He seemed so intrigued, so infatuated. 

I was baffled. Completely and utterly stumped by what I was looking at. As people filtered out, understandably discomforted by the presence of the hole itself, I found myself sending Steve off as well. I asked him very kindly to go and collect my cousin, who was most likely dead on the floor in the rave by then. I needed silence to figure it out. I needed to wrack my brain for an explanation, a logical one. Despite having prayed for a paranormal or extraterrestrial presence in the past, I then took back all my wishes. Panic flared in my chest, and I shoved it down hard. No anxiety. Just logic. No anxiety. 

By the time Steve came sauntering back towards me with Andrew trailing hesitantly behind him, I was stumped. I had nothing. So, I tried to look alive and concrete. Aside from a very real crisis, I wanted to credit Steve for being able to dig my stubborn cousin up from his self-supplied grave. I suppose even Andrew responded to a warm, steady voice. He had so many questions, those of which were promptly ignored due to the muted volume of them. He had sounded like a mouse. A mouse that I ignored. 

Steve asked him a question in return, one that I couldn’t quite hear, and then the blinding light of Andrew’s camera was suddenly ignited, shining down onto my crouched form.

I squinted up at him and, though I couldn’t see his face dimmed behind the camera, I knew Andrew was glaring at me as Steve jumped around like an excited puppy. This big, concerning hole seemed to make him feel like we had discovered magic. I put on my mask. The one that read as joyful. I was good at playing that card. I was good at lying. I sometimes wondered why I could look so in the moment while not paying attention in the slightest. I was the king of an empty kingdom called Mirage. 

Steve had already slipped down into the darkness of the hole before I could compute that he had moved at all. And then I was following him, sure that whatever he was after was worth risking my life for. Behind me, I could hear Andrew scuttering and complaining with his heavy camera shining bright. I didn’t turn back. I just walked and walked until I caught up finding Steve strangely reluctant to continue, despite having thrown himself down this rabbit hole himself. I ended up slipping in front of him, leaving him to deal one whining Andrew Detmer. I had not been interested previously, but it wasn’t a conscious decision any longer. I was moving along robotically, breaking into pieces. 

When the voices of my peers became background noise, the monster in my head became transfixed on a display of alien color. I had finally entered a space I belonged in and it felt like a dizzy serenity, like an overdose on cough syrup or being in so much pain that your brain blurs the lines between reality and fiction. It was not not real. The pain was not real. The room I stood in was not real. It was merely a flatline of silence, complete and utter silence, despite the movement in the room behind me. Despite the bodies moving forward slowly like zombies towards wayward humans. I felt the room go black. 

The next few days, I suffered from serial headaches and an urge to run. I could not sit still. The monster inside of me told me to move, despite its lack of fear. We weren’t going to die, it knew. But it also knew that something was going to happen, and that we were going to take it with the volume on. We were going to ignore the suggestions of a concerned mother and finally sleep after a week of having the vibrations of sound rattle the cord connecting my spine to my brain out of place. The monster slept beside it. It refused to plug it back in, frustrating me until I cried into ruffled bedsheets. I crashed and burned. I refused to scream. But it hurt. It hurt. It hurt. Like white-hot bolts of lightning. It hurt.

And then, there was a phone call. One that reminded me of David. One that placed me in the backyard of a boy I shouldn’t have had the luxury to know. We threw an old baseball back and forth inhumanely, and I swallowed back against the bitter taste of vomit. I was smiling with my mouth closed. I was taking it one step at a time, but with every noise, every slight production of sound, the monster would hum. I suppose, if it made sound of its own, it could drowned out the sound of Andrew laughing. Only, the sound merely echoed off the walls of my head. I grinned, despite it all. 

My friends stuck together like glue, and I realized they didn’t notice my absence on the bad days. I was given the ability to heave items into the air with an invisible force but I still didn’t want to live. Death loomed in my head, taunting me with its silence. Its sweet, sweet silence. I fantasized about my own funeral. I thought about my friends caring then. I thought about them being guilty, and finding my lack of pulse startling. It would not bring me back. But there was still a child within me that craved attention. I felt lonely in the aisle of grocery stores, always caught between with people who wouldn’t notice the issue. It was too much to just ask. To just speak up. I was silent, looming, and then laughing.

Contradiction tasted like diet coke, if you were asking. 

Andrew and Steve seemed to click, like they had been lovers in a past life. They looked at each other in something similar to child-like wonder, and I watched them, trying to examine the contents of infatuation. When David came to mind, I tried to remember all the times he had thrown up at parties. I tried to make him disgusting. As disgusting as me. If not more. And then, once again, there was Casey. I had no memories of her that could paint in a bad light. She was still Casey-Lacey from Middle School, dressed in Princess Leia inspired-attire for Costume Day. She was not anything bad. Just calm. 

A part of me wanted what Andrew and Steve had. I wanted something that was effortless and freeing. But Casey would not see me as effortless or freeing. I was a birdcage. Something that sat in a lonely woman’s home, in the corner of the room. I was beautiful, but I would not open. Instead, I was locked with the key swallowed back. Casey was a bird. A bird that would flee the expanse of this old town and leave me behind. I had no urge to claim her for my own. She would merely add to the backdrop of life. 

Casey Letter was meant to live in front, like a starlet on a wide stage in the twenties. The people would watch her in awe because people like her are only movie stars, not real people. There was no perfect person. But Casey, with her small, bony hand trapped beneath her camera and its strap, seemed as close as possible. She was like the embodiment of straight, white teeth and clean piano keys. She was in place, ready for the show. Or for high school. For eleventh grade AP classes and the hallways in between. 

But I could not feel anything at all. I merely stared, smiling at her like I wasn’t a neighborhood of unlit houses. And she would smirk back at me with one of her blonde eyebrows quirked up, almost as if she knew something I did not. I thought that if I was a series of dim places, she must be New York from above. She must be a city of light and color and love. I intended to see that one day for myself, just to see if I was right at seventeen. Just to see if people really are more than their respective bones within.

I thought, maybe, it would get better. I thought, with her curious gaze, that I could surmount myself.  
But in a haze of parties, of teenage victory, the unthinkable happened. My cousin killed his best friend in the rain on the same night I kissed the love of my life. They connected violently, I suppose, like a bullet through the heart of an innocent man. You know, those ads warning us about gun safety were right. Sometimes, the gun goes off by itself. Sometimes, it is not intentional. But intentions do not stop the bleeding, I know. I know, but the metaphorical bullet wound is better than the realistic lightning strike.

There was no blood, but there was a death. I do not know where it hit him, but there were times that I prayed that he was too shocked to feel it drain the life from his body. I prayed to a God I did not believe in that it was quick and painless. I hoped for silence, but not for the boys that thrived in noise. 

My mother believed that good things came to good people. It was a quote that was plastered on the doormat on our front porch for over half of my life, but I started to believe she was wrong. I wanted to apologize, again, for my lack of belief in her words. I did not trust those inspirational quotes any longer. I found out that life is not composed of those things, no matter how badly we want to believe them. There is no amount of soothing quotes to protect you from reality, no matter how harsh it seems now. There is no saving grace. There’s only you and those around you. And then only you again.

Much like Steve, who was found lifeless in the middle of a field. It looked like one of those black and white photographs, I thought. But you would have to time it perfectly and intricately. Like a single shot before Andrew shakily laid Steve’s body into the marsh and tried to leave his love there beside him, bleeding out into the grass. Or maybe afterwards, when his body became another part of the scenery. Anytime in between and you’d find a weeping blonde-haired boy, displacing the emphasis on emptiness, on vacancy. There was nothing vacant or empty about Andrew Detmer that night, I knew. 

I do not think Andrew intended for his love to follow him home, soaking wet and shaking. It became the ghost of something that used to take the shape of a crystalline smile. It was transparent and it faded in and out of Andrew’s swaying body at the funeral. Only to remind him that it was there. Only to remind him that the other half of him was below us that day. It was the eye of the hurricane. The calm before the storm. Or maybe, to be more exact, the calm after the storm. Before another fucking storm. 

I was so angry, but not at him. Good things come to good people. Good people do not die in rainstorms. ‘’What did you do?’’ I had asked that day, the buttons on my wrinkled shirt opened wide to reveal the sweat beneath my collar. ‘’What did you do?’’ 

My voice had been so jagged, like sharp stones in the steam that Andrew and I used to play in as children. One of my hands was in my pocket, thumbing over the bottle of rum, while the monster in my head rocked desperately back and forth. Back and forth. My thumb. The monster. Back and forth. Andrew looked like he had died as well. He looked like a dying child in a decaying photograph. He appeared to be starved, sickened, vaguely sticky. ‘’What… did you do?’’ I asked finally. Finally. 

Back and forth. A single foot forward. He lifted his trembling body from the ground, and I watched the camera, with its blinking red light, follow him up. It was recording me. Following my exhausted body with robotic eyes, and I stared back, but my eyes did not see. They were blank, I knew. My mask had slipped. All my cards were on the floor. My ability to live in a curtained kingdom fell as I did from the throne. I knew what he had done. I knew he did not intend to do it. Intentions do not stop the bleeding. I think I just wanted to hear him say it, maybe it would have made it different, realer, better. 

I suppose, at the time, a fist in his face felt right. I wanted to create a wave big enough to drown myself. I wanted my monster to hear the sound and cower. I wanted to bask in the incriminating, suffocating feeling of fear and swallow ocean water until all I could do was cough it back up. I wanted it to fill my lungs, and choke me until my vision blurred at the edges. Good things come to good people. Steve Montgomery had a gravestone, but not a high school diploma. I found myself jealous of his position.

I was not allowed to grieve for three weeks. I was given a set amount of days. Forty two hours to be exact. I could not sit still long enough to steady my own hands, much less pay attention to the violence unraveling on the television screen in front of me. The sirens and overlaid commentary dripped like water from the speakers, and the monster in my head finally broke. I was filled with sand. The shrill, discomforting shriek unleashed between my ears sent blood pouring from my nose. All I needed were car keys. Car keys. Car keys. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t think. Focus. Car keys. Couldn’t think. Car keys.

They were not my own, encouraging Casey to chase me down the pavement, attempting to keep up with the incessant beat of my heart, or maybe my feet. Probably my feet. I found myself thinking of my mother intrusively as my trembling hand attempted to unlock the car door. I had to be better. I had to be better. I had to be better. On the road, we found hoards of cars stuck in place. We allowed ourselves to slip down empty streets. The anxiety pulsing in my chest almost killed me. Almost. Almost. Almost.

I arrived at the crime scene and felt my heart drop from my chest to my shoes. It was so loud. So loud. It was a mixture of screams and gasps and police sirens. The monster tried to forcefully rip itself from my head. I was reminded of being fourteen, when it convinced me bridges were more like diving boards, when it told me that life was a composition of predestined moments. I did not listen at fourteen. But at seventeen, while saving my uncle’s limp body from colliding with the cement, I wondered if the ground was like water. I wondered if bridges really were like diving boards. I wondered if he was meant to die. If I had make a mistake. I did not know. I could not think in the slightest.

Andrew began to destroy the world around him, thinking it would diminish the crumbling of his own. People were ragdolls and buildings were blocks. He was the stumbling child trying to construct a world that Steve Montgomery didn’t live beneath. We were too young then, I think. Both terrified and frustrated and on the verge of death. He wanted to kill everyone around him. I wanted to kill myself. The rum, or maybe the depression, was not in my pocket. It was all over me, soaking me in something deceptively safe. I thought I could stop him if I reasoned with him. I thought I could help him. 

But I couldn’t. I was not my mother. I was not the booming monster in my head. I was Matt Garetty, but not to Andrew. Not to him. To him, I was an unresponsive cousin, a bad friend. He did not want to travel the world with me. He wanted to burrow into the chest of a boy who no longer existed. In that tattered hospital gown, he spread his fingers wide, willing the power from his body, and screamed in his broken, unused voice. He sobbed and willed the bullets forward. They couldn’t touch him. 

I couldn’t touch him. 

I do not believe he could hear my begging over the sound of his own monster. The one that he tried to tell me about two months before. The one that kept him up at night because it wouldn’t speak. But then, in that incriminating moment, it did. It broke his voice in. It made him wail to the extent of his lungs because fuck, if he was going out, he was going out with his ear-piercing cries for help in everyone’s head. He reminded me of myself at fourteen, desperate and vulnerable and utterly destructive. At fourteen, I did not kill myself. But at seventeen, I killed my cousin in open air. 

I pinned his body to the ground, like red tacts on a corkboard. The sound of the staff going through his body drove the monster down into my ribs where realization and fear swirled like stormclouds. The tears running down my face made me itch and the people watching me made me dig my blunt fingernails into the palms of my hands. He was dead. Like Steve. Unlike fourteen year old me. I pushed myself from my knees, sparing a single glance to the crowd of horrified people before bolting. 

The monster said we couldn’t breathe, that my lungs were constricted with string. But I knew it was there, pressing down on them. Neither of us wanted to take the guilt of murder. And yet I didn’t mind. I liked it. I liked feeling as if I were suffocating because it meant silence would come soon. And I liked silence. I liked places that held no life at all. I wanted to be there, with my stuttering lungs, and let myself revel in the agony. It had been seventeen years of agony leading to a final, consequential climax. 

I went to the only place that felt right. The place that had drawn broken cries from my own mouth.

That placed had been Tibet. I had set the only solid remembrance of Andrew on a tripod in the snow. I made a promise that tasted like blood leaving my mouth. It was something that triggered my gag-reflex, something that made the urge to empty my stomach on freshly fallen snow seem immediate. It wasn’t. I swallowed against it. I was good at it. At lying. At making empty promises. I felt that life was full of repetition, and I hated myself for noting the parallels between my promises. Fourteen and Seventeen. 

‘’And uh, I want you to know I’m gonna be better from now on,’’ I said to a patient camera, my voice threatened to quiver around the words. My speech had not been planned, but it had been well meant. Intentions do not stop the bleeding. It looked right, I suppose, but if you looked a bit closer, you’d notice the lack of light behind my eyes. The blue of my skin. I was so bland. Blank. Dead. I was dead. But I gave Andrew a small smile, something that he would have scoffed at previously. I tried to ignore myself for the sake of making this sincere. My words sounded like mere echoes of my mother’s. 

_'’You have to get better, Matt. You have to get better. You have to get better…’’_

Her sullen voice rang out in my head, sending shivers unrelated to the weather down my spine. 

‘’I’m gonna help people. I’m gonna find out what happened to us down there. I don’t care how long it takes. I’m gonna get answers. I’m gonna do it for you, and I’m gonna do it for Steve,’’ I continued, shaking the feeling of her cold palm touching my face away from my memories. I wondered if, over video tapes, you could sense empty promises. The doubt pooled in my stomach, and I began to wonder who I was trying to convince. I tried so hard. But I needed truth in my statement, something real and true. Something that tasted bright and hopeful and aspiring. Something other than myself. 

I sighed shakily, condensation breaking into the air like smoke. ‘’And… I just… I love you, man. I didn’t ever get a chance to tell you that I loved you. But I did, even if you ...didn’t understand the way I loved. It was from afar. Distantly. Where it was safe. I wished I had gotten closer. I wished I had more memories of us, but all that comes to mind is your… your lifeless… Yeah. Yeah. But guess what?’’ 

I turned the camera towards the monasteries, and watched the snow fall in real time as the film rolled. It wasn’t a film roll. It was digital. But it’s all in the detail. Anything that makes it more fictional for you, the reader, who was not standing in the freezing cold holding back tears. Anything to make the moment hypothetical. Anything to make this story seem more like a story to you. You. You. An impossible, theoretical person that may or may not read this work of ...fiction. Let’s call it fiction. I will not be a teenager who lost his early years to rum and you will not be real. Let’s lie together. Quietly. 

I’m writing this letter, not because I have someone to send it to, but because I need to get it off my chest. If I’m solving an alien murder-mystery, I need a clear slate. That wasn’t funny. This is an ink pen, and it doesn’t erase (I tried). My life, unfortunately, is the same way. It is ink that I cannot erase. But today is a new day, and I am still the same Matt Garetty I was at fourteen, at seventeen, only now I’m eighteen and the grief is still so apparent. It still washes over me like pancake syrup and sticks like it, too. 

But I’m trying my best. I’m doing my best. To be better. To make a difference. 

I am eighteen and I adore polaroid photos with sun glares in the corners. I like photographs that are full of color, that have people frozen in place with grins on their faces, hat have people in the middle of a sneeze, that have people living inside of them. I do not think about empty space anymore because empty space isn’t real. It’s not the truth, no matter how desperately the monster in your brain says it is. You are not a waste of space, reader. You cannot be. By simply existing, you’re serving a purpose. You’re thinking too hard about it. I know that thinking patterns don’t change in seconds, but hold onto me here.

I did not fix anything by sitting in place or kissing boys or forcing a smile. I gained nothing. I promise that nothing is going to happen if you push yourself into the limelight. You will not implode. You’ll look bright, stable, solid. I promise. I promise. Do the opposite of me. Tell your mother the truth. Kiss someone a little bit harder. Push harder. Think harder. Dream harder. If you take anything from this, take my hope. Take my ability to move forward despite wanting to drive a bullet through my skull. 

Andrew never let me win at video games or an argument. But I loved him. Steve never understood my jokes very well and made people into sexual icons. But I loved him. I loved them, not because they were special, but because they loved me. They loved me despite my awkward silences. They loved me when I didn’t return their calls. They loved me. And someone loves you. Don’t let it be past tense. Tell them you care. Tell them you need them. If I could go back, I would pour my love into everything because it was there. It was there. 

I didn’t feel it but it was there, while walking home at night, following the call of lamp posts in the dark. It was there when I slipped hard plastic across the delicate skin of my wrist and bled all over my bedspread. It was there when I sobbed and when I laughed and when I was uncomfortable. It’s underneath your skin, reader. It doesn’t taste like hard candy, but it’s beautiful and it’s there. It’s there. I promise. I promise. Close your eyes and let the butterflies go. Let them wash over you and leave you. 

I am full of regret, reader. I am full of pure, unadulterated agony because I watched my cousin, or my best friend, kill the only boy who held him like he was worth holding. I watched him curl into himself with his trembling fingers and his unwashed hair. I watched him dissolve into something similar to gasoline, and set fire, not only to himself, but the world around him. I watched him destroy and destroy until I destroyed him. I killed him in front of a crowd of padded police officers and civilians. 

I cannot get the image of him dying out of my brain. I cannot forget the sound of my frightened, pleading sobs towards him. I wake myself up in the middle of the night with my own screams. I find myself dreaming about funerals and bullet holes and storms. But I have to continue on. I have to get better. And so do you. Take a deep breath, even when your body trembles, and let it go. Remember that you’re alive, and that it is the most precious thing you’ll ever be. You were given a life. Live it. 

Even if you’re scared, especially if you’re scared. Live it the best you can. Don’t hide your depression in your pockets. Tell someone about it. You can do this because I can do this. I’m going to do this and survive. Don’t appreciate the beauty in those black and white photographs, take better ones. 

Intentions do not stop the bleeding, reader, but apologies patch the wound. 

With hope, 

Matt Garetty.


End file.
